As a major bill was winding its way through the Confederate Congress, a Richmond newspaper found one proposed change to draft exemptions particularly troubling. From the Richmond Daily Dispatch February 1, 1864:
Congress and the Press.
daily no more?
The Confederate Congress, unless it is their intention to stop the daily press of the Confederacy, should amend that portion of the act which has passed the Senate exempting only the printers and one editor of a daily press. We do not suppose that the action of the Senate was designed to paralyze the great organ of the popular mind and heart, and to strike dumb the speaking trumpet which has summoned this nation to the battle. We are inclined to the belief that their action arose from ignorance of the details of a daily office, and from supposing that a daily newspaper can be got out like a weekly newspaper, where the editor is often his own bookkeeper, reporter, writer, pressman, and packer. Now, a daily paper requires, in addition to the editor proper, reporters in both branches of Congress and of the Legislature, and the Courts and markets; and after it is writen and printed, it requires the services of several clerks, writing all night long, to enclose and direct the paper to its multitude of subscribers through the mails. These are as necessary to the paper as the printers, and such persons have always been found necessary in daily papers since daily papers were in existence. Taking the number so employed in Richmond, which a contemporary states at twenty-four, we do not suppose that the military law would add one hundred men to the army. Is it worth while, for such an addition, to strike down what all free nations have considered the “Palladium of Liberty?”
In regard to that feature of the military bill which orders the enrolment of the whole country, we have only to say, what we have often said before, that if it becomes a law, the Yankees will hail it with delight as the last resort of desperation and despair, and will cry out to their population that they have only to hold out a little longer, for the Southern Confederacy is already playing, and will soon lose, its last card.
There is evidence that the second amendment is considered the Palladium of Liberty. The Palladium of Liberty was also an abolitionist paper published from 1843-1844 in Ohio.
